lettie's memory book

My “Lettie Mize Research Project” led me down a path this week that I had not anticipated traveling. I spent several hours Monday afternoon in the historic records office at the Monte Vista Christian Church reading through old documents and chatting with a very nice woman connected to the church’s history committee. I really wasn’t sure what sort of additional information I would gather from that source, but given that Lettie and Isaac Mize were both charter members of the church having split from Albuquerque’s Broadway Christian Church in 1931, I figured it was worth a shot. As interesting as the details behind that split are, they are beyond the scope of my original research goals- to locate photographs of Lettie and her family, preferably photos taken in the house or in the yard. But if you really want to hear the details, ask me sometime over a beer.

One of the items I began thumbing through at the church was this several-inch-thick red scrapbook that was filled with newspaper clippings, photos, copies of mimeographed weekly church bulletins, hand written notes and various other ephemera entitled “The Book of Remembrance.” As it turns out, Lettie was a bit of a history buff, and it appears that she would have wholeheartedly approved of my project. The book was one of her pet projects.

It was very interesting to see all the stuff that Lettie and Isaac were involved with in the church. However, it made me wonder if all those commitments left them with enough free time to follow baseball. Probably not. It is beginning to look like my only hope of ever finding OLD baseball cards squirreled away in the house is if their son Wallace chose to rebel and run off to the ballpark instead of attending church. I KNOW he played marbles.

Although I generally attempt to avoid stealing ideas and words from other people, I can’t help but include a portion of text that was prepared by Lettie, and delivered to the congregation during a ceremonial dedication of “The Book of Remembrance” on June 25, 1953. While you are reading that, I will be deciding whether I should record the names of all the committees Lettie served on during her 41 years with the church, so take the easy route and only list the ones she wasn’t involved with.

“But memory is an individual thing. Your memories are different from mine. We would not all agree on the important events that have taken place in our congregation.

Even if men were absolutely authentic and infallible, we don’t live in this world forever. While we are here, we are helping to make history. But no one will ever know about it unless it is recorded for future generations to read.

Someone has said, “One who knows nothing about his ancestry cares little about his posterity.” (See, even Lettie saw fit to using someone else’s words once in a while!) So we might say one who knows nothing of the past takes little interest in moulding the future.

We are indebted to the past. What we are today, we owe largely to the generations that have gone before. What we do today is the past history of tomorrow.

All this is true with families, so it is true with nations and congregations. Someone laid the foundation, others built thereon, and still others added to what they found. (I wonder if she wrote this stuff in the same room of the house that now serves as blog kabin central.)

In order to keep the record straight and that your account and my account may not conflict, we need a place in which to record important events as they take place so that our great, great grandchildren can say, “Look, ‘The History of Monte Vista’ says”----

The planning and recording for the beginning of the book will take time. Old records will have to be found and verified. There will have to be consultations with members who were “witnesses” from the beginnings.”

There is another full page of text that spells out what sorts of information would be recorded in the book, including photostatic copies of signatures of charter members; photos and details of ministers; lists of memorial gifts and donors; copies of programs of historical value; lists of names of all young people in the Armed Forces during World War II; and much more.

Lettie’s text concluded after describing the scene of how “The Book of Remembrance” would be paraded out into the congregation after she completed her oration. During the singing of the hymn “Follow in Their Train,” the book was to be carried down the aisle by a child on top of a white pillow adorned with purple streamers. After that, a prayer was offered to ask that the book be revered as the years pass, and serve as an “example and inspiration to each succeeding generation.”

It really is a neat piece of local history. Unfortunately, it seems that I am one of the few people who has shown much interest in the document for quite some time. I wouldn’t classify the document as “dusty,” but it was clear that the book hadn’t received all the attention it had become accustomed to once Lettie retired her scissors and rubber cement in the late 60s.

Ultimately, I was quite pleased with the new source of information, as I was able to finally locate a photograph of Lettie. This one was taken around 1967ish when Lettie was in her mid 70s.



Another interesting tidbit I brought away from the church was the discovery that Lettie served as the Superintendent of the church’s “Junior Mission Band.” That, and the fact that they often held practice in what is now our living room. I’m beginning to suspect that Lettie didn’t keep any cats in the house.

Louisa S. (Lipscomb) Watson - Lettie's mother

The continuing saga of researching Lettie Watson Mize...

Louisa S. (Lipscomb) Watson, the mother of Lettie W. (Watson) Mize, was born in 1845 on a farm in Jackson County, Missouri - the same year as Ellis Albert Swearengen (of HBO’s Deadwood fame).

Louisa was one of ten children resulting from the union of Joel Lipscomb and Henrietta Harris. Four of her siblings failed to reach adulthood. William S. Lipscomb, one of Louisa’s brothers, was a 2nd lieutenant of Company A, 6th Missouri infantry with the Confederate Army. He was killed at the Siege of Vicksburg, on June 25, 1863. Nathan Lipscomb, Louisa’s other brother that served in the Confederate Army, participated in and survived the same ordeal.

Louisa married Dr. John Ellis Watson at New Santa Fe, Missouri on November 1, 1871. I am working on the hunch that Lettie was the youngest of the three Watson children, following Dr. Frank Lipscomb Watson and sister Alma (Watson) Horton into the world.

Having already spent one lifetime at the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, presumably watching wagon train upon wagon train of settlers heading west into the great unknown, Louisa moved to Albuquerque in 1905 along with Lettie and Alma. I am interested to learn why exactly Louisa chose to relocate as a widow so far away from her friends and family, and to find out if any of her brothers or sisters also made the move. It appears that her son Frank did not make the journey west.

I assume that Louisa was the first owner of our house, but without a copy of the deed or any other documentation, that is pure speculation on my part. I have yet to uncover any evidence that Louisa was employed while living in Albuquerque, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that she was involved in education. Certainly she was greatly admired in the community as her passing away here at home was noted on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal on November 6, 1928.

Louisa’s obituary noted that she rarely missed a service at the Broadway Christian Church. It was reported that a severe illness left Louisa totally blind in 1923, but at the age of 78 retained enough desire and patience to learn how to read and write and to work with her hands. Not once did she complain of her physical handicap during the final five years of her life. An inspirational pioneer story if ever I’ve heard one!

I was confused when I initially discovered Louisa’s grave at Sunset Memorial Park since I had been under the impression that the cemetery didn’t even exist in 1928. Archival research provided an additional kink when it revealed that Louisa wasn’t buried there until the 1960s. Locating Louisa’s obituary helped clear up the mystery surrounding her final resting place somewhat as it stated that the interment was to be made in the Fairview Cemetery several miles to the south and east. It seems she wasn’t quite done moving after all.

Lettie Watson Mize: an introduction

Way back when I used to do archaeology, one of the questions someone was always asking me was, “How do you know where to dig?” If I answered them honestly, I would reply, “If it was up to me, I sure as hell wouldn’t be digging here.” Of course an answer like that would require some explaining, and that would take time- something that was usually at least as precious as having enough water for the day while taking a pounding from the sun in the middle of the Sonoran desert.

The bottom line is that roughly 100 percent of every archaeological project I was ever paid to work on was driven by some pending construction project that had some level of governmental funding, and therefore required cultural resource studies to be completed. Ideally, those studies would be completed before the project got underway, but I think most of us here are adult enough to accept that we don’t live in a perfect world.

On the other hand, some of the “neatest” projects I ever worked on were done so on a volunteer basis. The kool thing about a volunteer project is that you are able to pick and choose the ones to invest your time and energies in. So if you think it sounds like a crackpot idea, not getting involved is always an option. Oddly enough, I can’t name a single historical project where I ever volunteered my help.

I guess that all changed for me when we bought our house in 2004 and I began wondering about the people who had lived here at different times over the past 100 years. Basic questions like “Who were they,” and “What sorts of things did they do?” Unfortunately, it seems that when you buy a house, a comprehensive listing of that sort thing isn’t included. Perhaps it should be. Then again, I quickly learned that the process of figuring out answers to my questions is as entertaining as it is challenging.

The initial challenge is deciding where, and how, to dig without a shovel. Armed with pencil, a notebook and the knowledge that our house was listed on the New Mexico State Register of Historic Places as the “Lettie Watson House,” I made my first of many walks to the historic records library. Once there, I set about going through all of the available* Albuquerque city directories published since 1904 and making a list of the names of people who lived in our house. (*Note: Not surprisingly, they don’t have city directories for every year, so my data was almost immediately compromised.) In addition to keeping track of the occupations of all the people who lived in the house, my database also included names and address for anyone named Watson or Mize (Lettie’s eventual married name) to possibly assist with my long range plan of finding living descendants who might be able to provide old photographs of the house or people who lived in it over the decades.

This undertaking was going to take a considerable amount of time and dedication in order to make any progress, not to mention ample portions of good luck. Eventually I had pieced together enough information that I started to think of my database as the exterior portion of a jigsaw puzzle. You know, the pieces with one straight edge. To be sure, there were still some missing pieces, including a couple of the corners, but at least I had some firm lines to build upon.

From that information alone I was able to figure out that Lettie had lived in our house “pretty much” all the time from 1906 or 1907 through the mid 1950s. Her mother, Louise Watson, had lived here “more or less” all the time that same period until she passed away right before the Great Depression. Lettie had married a meat cutter named Isaac Mize, who used to work across the street from the school where Lettie had been employed as a teacher. (Yes, part of my research includes walkabouts so I can make observations of the actual structures and properties in order to better visualize the physical environment rather than trying to imagine it in my brain that is already stuffed with numbers and names and such.) I also had determined that Lettie and Isaac had at least one child named Henrietta, but that was pretty much the end of that source.

Eventually, additional investigative work led to my discovery of Lettie’s gravesite in a cemetery just a few miles north of the house. Her mother had been buried on one side, her husband on the other. A thorough search of the surrounding area failed to reveal her daughter’s grave, and I chose to think of that as a good sign that she had either moved away, or was still living. The possibility that she had married and produced children was the best-case scenario.

Although you might suspect that finding someone’s headstone would be somewhat of a dead end, it is in reality quite the opposite for a historian. Those grave markers actually provided key information that I needed to push forward- dates of death. With that information, I was able to quickly locate appropriate obituaries by accessing copies of old newspapers on microfilm at the library. Without those dates, I wouldn’t even have attempted such a task.

There are some fantastic cemetery websites available to today’s historians. One that I am particularly fond of is called Find a Grave. I plan on supporting that site by adding the information I gather from this project, as well as posting photos I snap of random headstones. If I end up helping a single historian or genealogist on a future project even if by accident, then it is well worth the effort it takes to upload a few images.

It seems important to state that the discovery of these obituaries has led to the unearthing of a wealth of data about Lettie and her family. In turn, that information has set my research on a course that I had not anticipated. While I ponder what to do with the information, it makes sense for me to begin writing short biographies of the people involved- noting that these bios will require modification as additional information becomes available.

This blog seems an appropriate place as any to post them, and it seems only fitting to begin with what I’ve learned about Lettie. Assuming I fail to find a different voice to describe other people encountered in my research, they will be discussed based on their relationship to Lettie, or to the historic property itself.

Lettie W. (Watson) Mize

Lettie W. Watson was born on the westernmost edge of the United States on November 26, 1881 in New Santa Fe, Missouri. Today, only a small cemetery surrounded by a wrought iron fence remains of the town that once served as the virtual starting line for the Santa Fe Trail. Born ten years after her parents Dr. John Ellis Watson and Louisa S. Lipscomb were married, Lettie grew up with one sister, Alma Watson (Horton), and one brother, Dr. Frank L. Watson.

Following the death of Lettie's father, her mother packed up the house and moved to Albuquerque in 1905 with Lettie and Alma in tow. At present, there is no evidence to suggest that Frank moved to Albuquerque. It is reported that he was living in McAllister, Oklahoma in 1928. Louisa and Lettie became the first residents of the brand new house at 316 Walter Street sometime between 1906 and 1907. It is unclear whether or not Alma also lived here or elsewhere in the city.

By 1907, Lettie was employed as a teacher at the First Ward School. By 1911, she had taught at the Third and Second ward schools. Not long after that, she had married a butcher named Isaac Mize, and given birth to two children- Henrietta in 1913 and Wallace (date unknown- but I am working on it).

By the end of the 1920s, Lettie was employed as an “expression teacher,” a job I believe she performed here in the house. If you have any idea what an “expression teacher” did, please shoot me a comment. I am of the belief that she coached people in the art of public speaking or debate.

The last time I can confidently place Lettie in the house was 1955, but I suspect she remained in Albuquerque after she moved. A charter member of Monte Vista Christian Church, Lettie also served as a regent of the Lew Wallace Chapter of the National Society of the Daughter of the American Revolution.

Lettie passed away following a long illness at the age of 90 on July 8, 1972, exactly 33 years and one day after the death of her husband Isaac.